Beyond the Secret Garden Read online

  Contents

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  PREFACE

  FOREWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  1 Preparing for the Party 1849–1865

  2 My Object is Remuneration 1865–1873

  3 Chestnuts off a Higher Bough 1874–1881

  4 The Universal Favourite 1882–1886

  5 The Gratitude of British Authors 1887–1889

  6 Death and the Doctor 1889–1893

  7 The Life of the World 1892–1895

  8 Affairs Theatrical 1896–1899

  9 The Amazing Marriage 1900–1907

  10 Was That the Party? 1907–1924

  DATES AND PLACES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  PLAYS

  MAIN PUBLISHED SOURCES

  Endnote

  List of Illustrations

  Frances Hodgson Burnett

  Manchester, at the time of Frances’ birth

  Edwin Hodgson’s trade advertisement

  Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1865

  Washington, D.C., in 1880

  Dr Swan Burnett

  Richard Watson Gilder

  Frances with Vivian and Lionel in 1888

  Little Lord Fauntleroy drawn by Reginald Birch

  Elsie Leslie as Fauntleroy

  Buster Keaton as Fauntleroy

  Mary Pickford as both Fauntleroy and his mother

  Freddie Bartholomew as Fauntleroy

  Playbill of The Little Princess

  Millie James as the Little Princess

  Frances Hodgson Burnett in Men and Women of the Day

  Israel Zangwill

  Henry James

  Letter from Frances to Vivian

  63 Portland Place, London W.1

  Dr Stephen Townesend

  Frances in 1888

  Vivian Burnett

  Edith Jordan

  Mary, Colin and Dickon in the Secret Garden

  Maytham Hall, Rolvenden

  Plandome Park, Long Island

  Frances in 1921

  Preface

  The ebook of my first biography is the sixth appearance of my life of Frances Hodgson Burnett, and this Print-on-Demand edition is the seventh. I am very glad Macmillan Bello is making the book available in these new forms. Macmillan was one of my earliest publishers, bringing out my children’s novel The Camelthorn Papers (later a Puffin) in 1969 and the annual Allsorts, which I edited, over five years.

  The first hardbacks of this book were published under the title Waiting for the Party: The Life of Frances Hodgson Burnett. They came out in 1974, both in England, from Secker and Warburg, and in America, from Scribner, one of Burnett’s own publishers, whose archives at Princeton were a useful source. So were her daughter-in-law, Constance, and her grand-daughter, Dorinda, in Boston, both long since dead.

  The excellent reviews included ones from Alison Lurie (on both sides of the Atlantic) and from Elizabeth Jane Howard, who reminded me of hers, not long before her recent death.

  Two paperbacks followed, under the same title: from David R. Godine of Boston in the United States in 1991 and from Faber and Faber in London in 1994. Both of these came out after the award of the Biography of the Year prize to my life of A. A. Milne.

  Then, when they were out of print, Sophie Bradshaw, a keen young editor at Tempus (later part of the History Press) included both books in her list of literary biographies. In 2007 she asked me to agree to a new title, which would make readers immediately aware of Burnett’s most beloved book. We have kept this title for the new editions and I look forward to a new generation of readers.

  Ann Thwaite, Norfolk, 2014.

  FOREWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many people have asked me how I came to write this book. I can trace my first consideration of the possibility to a passage in John Rowe Townsend’s useful study of children’s literature Written for Children (1965).

  Frances Hodgson Burnett was a more powerful and I believe a more important writer than Miss Yonge or Mrs Ewing or Mrs Molesworth. On the strength of only three books . . . I believe she must be acknowledged as standing far above every other woman writer for children except E. Nesbit; and there are depths in Mrs Hodgson Burnett that Nesbit never tried to plumb. It is hard to account for her neglect (neglect by critics that is; she has not been neglected by readers). I do not know of any modern study of her work beyond an eighteen-page chapter in a book by Marghanita Laski . . . True, Mrs Hodgson Burnett’s personal character was flamboyant and unappealing; in the years of her success she suffered a gross inflation of the ego; and Miss Laski justly says she emerges from the pages of her son’s book The Romantick Lady as “aggressively domineering, offensively whimsical and abominably self-centred and conceited”. But if we were to judge writers by their personal qualities rather than their work—a mistake which Miss Laski does not make—the map of English literature would be a very odd one. I think myself that a large part of the explanation lies in the notoriety of Little Lord Fauntleroy. Instead of adding to its author’s reputation, as it should, this book hangs albatross-wise round her neck.

  Until I read this, I had no idea that Mrs Burnett was considered to have been flamboyant and unappealing. Could the author of The Secret Garden really have been so self-centred and unattractive a character? I could not believe it, and I wanted to find the evidence. The Secret Garden was one of the three or four most important books of my own childhood, in that it was read and re-read, and the atmosphere of it became part of my own life. I knew Mary Lennox better than most of the children in my own form at school and Misselthwaite Manor better than many places I had lived in. Marghanita Laski, in the study referred to by John Rowe Townsend, says of The Secret Garden: “It is the most satisfying children’s book I know.” I have found countless people share this view.

  I would like to express my thanks to both Mr Townsend and Miss Laski—to the latter in particular for her bibliography, which first put me on the track of many books I had never heard of and which is the basis of my own fuller one. It was Miss Laski who first drew my attention to the fact that Mrs Burnett was not only the author of three outstanding children’s books but of numerous adult novels and plays. She did not begin as a writer for children—her first novel was compared favourably with those of George Eliot—and even after the phenomenal success of Little Lord Fauntleroy she continued to devote much more of her time to the adult market.

  I must also acknowledge my debt to Vivian Burnett’s book about his mother: it was published by Scribner’s in New York in 1927 but never appeared in England. If Mrs Burnett emerges from this book as domineering, conceited and the rest, it was certainly not because Vivian saw her that way. His book is an act of filial piety. It is written in a style which, forty-five years later, we find unbearably fey but it is strong on facts and surprisingly frank at times. I have whenever possible gone back to original sources and I have read hundreds of letters, newspaper interviews and news items, some of them quoted in that book. It is interesting to find that the only consistent cuts in Vivian’s quotations from letters are in references to smoking. Israel Zangwill is not allowed to wish Frances “cigarettes and peppermints ad lib”, nor is she permitted to call one of the rooms at Maytham a smoking-room. There are other letters, of course, particularly during the short years of his mother’s marriage to Stephen Townesend, which Vivian did not use at all. My most important source outside the family and the hundreds of unpublished letters to and from Frances in the Scribner archives at Princeton University, was an unpublished memoir, including a number of her letters, by Henry Hadfield which I found in Manchester Public Library. This added considerably to my knowledge of her early years which is otherwise based largely on her own memories recorded in 1892 in The One I Knew the Best of All.


  Throughout I have remembered R. L Stevenson’s dictum, “It must always be foul to tell what is false and it can never be safe to suppress what is true”, and I am very grateful to the Burnett family for their cooperation. I know they did not welcome the idea of a new biography. They knew how much Vivian had suffered all his life from his identification with Little Lord Fauntleroy. They were worried that a biographer would turn psychiatrist and analyse with cruelty that mother–son relationship. They felt that Vivian had written Mrs Burnett’s life and that that should be enough. But once they accepted I really was writing the book, Vivian’s daughter, Dorinda, and her husband Robert Le Clair could not have been kinder and more helpful—sending me fat parcels of old letters and encouraging me with their sympathetic interest in the task I had set myself.

  I have used the name Frances throughout for convenience, although she was rarely called that. As a child, she was Fannie; later it was Fluffy or Dearest or Mrs Burnett or Mrs Townesend. With a man it is simple to use his surname throughout; with a woman it is more complicated. If “Frances” suggests a degree of intimacy she would never have allowed me, I am sorry.

  Some people may find the plot-paraphrases and reviews of books and plays irritating and prefer to get on with the life; but it seemed to me essential, when so many of her books and plays are totally forgotten, to give considerable space to them. I have not been consistent in my treatment. Mrs Burnett wrote too much for me to cover fully the contents and reception of everything she produced. I have preferred to be influenced more by the interest of the material available than by the importance I place on the book or play. The Lady of Quality, for instance, has no permanent value. I would not recommend it to anyone. But contemporary reactions to it are interesting enough for me to give it a good deal of space. Conversely, Miss Defarge or A Woman’s Will is a book I admire a good deal but I have come across no related material, so the space given to it is slight. If Fauntleroy dominates my book, it is inevitable, for it dominated Frances’ life and changed it and her.

  When I was in Boston talking to Vivian’s daughter and her husband, I was also fortunate enough to meet Vivian’s widow, Constance Burnett. She received me at her home on Beacon Hill and spoke of the past. She had herself written a brief children’s biography of Frances called Happily Ever After. I queried the title. On the surface, of course, Frances’ life was an extremely successful one. The young girl, who had picked wild grapes on the hillside in Tennessee to pay for the postage on her first stories, had gone on to write one of the best sellers of the century, admired by Gladstone, the Prime Minister of England. She had been a friend of an American president, an extremely rich and famous woman whose opinions were sought on every subject. Henry James had addressed her as “noblest of neighbours and most heavenly of women”. But “Happily Ever After”?

  She wanted life to be a fairy story. She wanted to make dreams come true—her own and other people’s. She wanted all her life to be at the Party. But again and again throughout her life reality was a disappointment. It was only in her books that she could make things go the way she wanted them to. It was only in my own favourite of all her adult novels, Through One Administration, that she admitted an ending close to life as she knew it. In that book, more completely perhaps than in any other, she deals in what George Eliot called “the half-tints of real life”. Her own life was too often in technicolor, an uncomfortable blaze. I said to her daughter-in-law that I thought in many ways it had been a tragic life, and the younger Mrs Burnett, now herself an old lady, nodded in agreement,

  I would also like to thank the staff of the Lincoln Center Library of the Performing Arts, New York, whose excellent filing system made my work much easier; the staff of the Division of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, where I was given every help when I worked on the Scribner archives; Miss Pollyanna Creekmore and Mr William J. Mac Arthur of the McClung Historical Collection, Knoxville, Tennessee, who dug out a great deal of material relating to Frances’ early days; the staff of the Local History Library, Manchester Public Library; Mr Fred Johnson of the Town Clerk’s Department, Manchester, who helped me to find the houses Frances lived in, and the Librarian of the Medical College Library, St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London.

  I am grateful to Mr Tom Rosenthal for his continuous enthusiasm for my project; Miss Valerie Bradshaw, who put at my disposal the results of her own considerable researches; Mrs Marion de Kay Rous, Mr Ormonde de Kay and Lady Hodgkin; Miss Gillian Avery, Mr Terry Coleman, Miss Janet Dunbar, Professor Leon Edel, the Hon. Mrs Fraser (Pamela Maude), Mr Kenneth Fahnestock, Mrs Gill Frayn, Mrs Anne Harvey, Mrs Penelope Lively, Miss Sophia Macindoe, Mr Raymond Mander and Mr Joe Mitchenson, Miss Philippa Pearce, Professor and Mrs Christopher Ricks, Lord Scarborough, Dr Ann Zito, Air Commodore E. J. D. Townesend, Lt. Col. G. A. F. Townesend, Mr and Mrs G. D. P. Townesend and Mrs G. M. Townesend, Miss Winnie Comber, Mrs Alice Freeborn, Mr Harry Milium and others at Rolvenden, Kent. And, most of all, to my family, whose help and toleration made the whole thing possible.

  I also acknowledge assistance from the Arts Council of Great Britain which allowed me to spend much more time on the book than would otherwise have been reasonable.

  My publishers and I would like to thank the following for their kind permission to reproduce illustrations: Institute of Cost and Management Accountants (63 Portland Place); Collections of the Library of Congress (Washington, D.G., in 1880); McClung Collection, Lawson McGhee Library (Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1865); Manchester Public Libraries (Manchester City Trade Directory of 1852); Mansell Collection (Henry James); National Portrait Gallery (Israel Zangwill); New York Public Library (playbill of the 1903 American production of The Little Princess); Radio Times Hulton Picture Library (Mary Pickford in the film of Little Lord Fauntleroy).

  A.T

  1974

  Chapter One

  Preparing for the Party

  1849–1865

  There is in front of me A Plan of Manchester and Salford (“with their Vicinities, Embracing every Improvement, from Actual Survey”), dated 1848. At the northern edge of the map, York Street, Cheetham Hill, where Frances Hodgson Burnett was born the following year, looks a pleasant place, backing on to open country, with trees and grass and lakes. A few miles away in Salford, in the bend of the River Irwell, there is a jungle of streets and courts, dark on the map, marked Islington. Close at hand is the New Bailey Prison, the railway and the coal wharves of the Bury Canal. It was to this area that small Frances Hodgson moved in 1855, following the death of her father. The contrast between light and dark, comfort and poverty, was the dominant theme of her books.

  Friedrich Engels was living in Manchester at this time and saw both worlds: “Right and left, a multitude of covered passages led from the main streets into numerous courts and he, who turns in thither, gets into a filth and disgusting grime the equal of which is not to be found.” Engels wrote of the “coal-black foul-smelling streams full of debris and refuse”, of the tanneries, bone-mills and gas-works.

  Cheetham Hill, on the other hand, like Chorlton on Medlock, Ardwick and Pendleton on the outskirts of Manchester, had “free, wholesome country air” and “fine comfortable homes”. Engels noted that “the members of the money aristocracy can take the shortest road through the middle of all the labouring districts to their places of business, without ever seeing that they are in the midst of the grimy misery that lurks to the right and to the left”.

  Edwin Hodgson, Frances’ father, had his business at 62 King Street, Deansgate and it was certainly a short and easy journey down York Street, over Ducie Bridge, down Long Mill Gate, past the Cathedral and into Deansgate. Mr Hodgson was not one of the money aristocracy but he lived comfortably enough on their trade. He was a General Furnishing Iron-monger and Silversmith and provided them with chandeliers and plated goods and all sorts of articles to adorn their splendid homes—demand for the kind of goods he supplied was stimulated by the magnificent hardware section in the Great Exh
ibition of 1851.

  Edwin Hodgson and Eliza Boond had been married in the Church of St John, Manchester on 28th November 1844. Both Edwin and his father, John Hodgson, gave their occupations as “Manufacturer”. William Boond, Eliza’s father, is described as a “Collector”, presumably of rents. The story went that John Hodgson had been one of the first to introduce the spinning jenny into his factory and had met with the usual fierce opposition of the operatives. William Boond had apparently come down in the world, for Frederick Boond, Frances’ cousin, once described their mutual grandfather as “a well-known dyer, connected with one of the older dyeing establishments in Manchester”. Moreover the family believed that the Boonds were descended from “Elizabeth Wyddeville and Sir John Grey of Groby in Cheshire” and further back from an extraordinary Anglesey chieftain called Cadraad Haard, who was often invoked when particular toughness in the face of difficulties was called for.

  There was the strong feeling that both families had seen better days and that better days might come again with hard work, good reading and a careful attention to manners and standards a little more demanding than those of most of their neighbours. A candlestick-maker might consider himself a cut above a butcher and a baker.

  The Hodgsons began their married life after a long courtship. Edwin was now twenty-eight and his wife a year older. He wrote to his mother-in-law on the first day of his married life, in the only letter of his which is preserved. He was telling her of their safe arrival at Lockwood’s Hotel, York (Edwin came from Yorkshire: he had been born in Doncaster).

  Dear Mother:

  This is the first letter you have ever received from me—and although I have tried for a great number of years in order to be qualified and admitted into your family—I trust the appellation is pleasing to you.

  We arrived here last night, all safe, thank God, but as you may very well conceive, completely tired out . . .

  We hope that the day passed off in every way that you could wish, after we left—and that the company departed with happy faces and kind wishes. Eliza is very well and happy and sends her dear, dear love . . .